The works in Claus Carstensen’s new solo show at Galleri Tom Christoffersen are specifically based on horse fights in the Philippines. Horse heads are the recurring motifs drawn and merged into an expressive black and green abstraction. The powerful expression of the horse mimes the one of the work. Opposite the tortious language of the paintings are the pure bloated horse pictures in the paper works just subtly defaced and clear-cut in their appearance. Not in-between, but nonetheless as a kind of balancing weight, the exhibition is finished by a series of modifications through further work on already completed prints and drawings with horse motifs.

The paintings, defaced posters and modifications in the exhibition is about the concept Dyregørelser (Animalisation):

”Dyregørelser is a two-sided anthropological size, the two sides being interrelated, and it is about modulations of concepts such as culture, emergence of consciousness and the particular humanly. An aphorism tells: To live is to loose terrain. It is to be understood by the difference between the human and the animal, namely that the human is conscious about that he or she does not live in an open, endless terrain, but sees oneself losing terrain – contrary to the animal seeing an open, unbounded, timeless landscape, neither containing a ‘before’ nor an ‘after’, thus neither being conscious of death.

Dyregørelser exists both in an aggressive active form and in a passive form. The passive part, the “animal-becoming”, is composed by an enormous yearning for eternal life without conscience of the death – the cult of eternity is the oldest sickness of the human. The active part, “animalisations”, is about turning “the others” into animals aware of being positioned higher in the hierarchy than those being debased by the animalisation.”

Thus the animal is at once desirable and rejected, and Claus Carstensen highlights this complex relationship in his works. We are confronted with pictures demanding something, penetrating, and as the extreme reminding us about the inevitable - or contrarily they might remind us more of the obvious, to remember to live life.

Claus Carstensen is quoted from interviews in the catalogue ”Whats Left (Is Republican Paint) – Nine Sisters” from ARoS and from Kopenhagen.dk.